The "Best" RPG Ever-40

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

I know I know, I'm breaking my "captions or things with images between imageless story parts" rule again, but honestly, I made four captions in a row last month so I feel like publishing a few story parts in a row this month is perfectly fair. I mean, I've finally gotten past an awful writer's block on this story and I want to make as much as I can of it before the momentum dies out.

---

"Your appearance has changed."
"Aack!" Mira jumped in surprise at a voice a couple of feet away, where there definitely hadn't been anyone a minute ago. She had been on her way to one of the...shadier-seeming shops that sold a hard-to-get material, and wound up in an alley she'd thought was deserted. To be honest, each successive ritual required a bit more, and slightly harder to find, ingredients to make work, and this was a new one for the fourth. The source of the voice was the Captain, who apparently included 'being a ninja' among her ridiculously long list of talents. She didn't seem too amused by having surprised the witch though, just leaning against a wall with the usual stern expression and her arms crossed.

"Um...yeah," Mira eventually responded after a moment of awkward silence.

"Each change in appearance for a witch or warlock comes with a significant boost in physical and magical ability. You undoubtedly feel much stronger than you did before." She stood fully up.

"R-right.." It seemed like this was leading somewhere.
"I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I disagreed with my party on why the warlock we slew had gone bad, but not on that he had done so. Mostly I just didn't think there was enough evidence that he hadn't been evil to begin with. I'm open to the possibility that I was wrong. So I want to give you a warning."

Mira just nodded. It seemed rude to interrupt her at this point.
"You will feel more and more powerful as you progress. You might feel able to do anything you want, and if you are either hiding the inclination to hurt others, or if you are tempted to begin doing so by that feeling...remember that I am watching you."

"Err..okay..?"
The Captain frowned a bit harder. "I won't judge you on hearsay. If someone accuses you of something I will seek out the truth rather than jumping to conclusions. But if I have solid evidence that you are hurting people in my city, I will track you down and kill you without hesitation. And even if I fail, you will still die as a result."

"W-well, I..I wasn't gonna hurt anyone anyway!" said Mira, feeling a little insulted. "I'm a nice person, I want power to help and protect people!"

"If that remains true, then we won't have a problem. Consider it an incentive to stay on the right path." Her frown lessened a bit, and she remained calm. Something about it was very infuriating.

"I don't need incentive, or—or someone threatening to kill me! I'll be nice all on my own!" shouted the witch. "I'll be the nicest, most helpful archdemon this world has ever seen!"

Mira panted slightly, her cheeks a bit puffed out from the yelling. The Captain just shrugged. "Don't forget you said that. Here." She produced a small, pitch-black gem shaped like a tall octahedron, and offered it to Mira. "You'll need this eventually."
"Um...thanks?" The witch took the odd gem and looked at it for a second or two, and back to the Captain. "I mean, thanks." There was a faint pulse of dark magic from deep inside it, but she couldn't quite place it.
"Just keep it somewhere safe. It isn't really legal to have one of those, so you'd have a lot of trouble finding a new one." With that, the Captain turned to walk away.
"Umm, bye?" Mira waved at her, but she didn't turn around, heading off to the main thoroughfare. Once it seemed like she was gone, the witch just shook her head, placing the odd stone in her inventory. "Well, that was weird...."

---

"Hey. Hey! Can you hear me? How bad is it?"

Clera opened her eyes, not remembering closing them. It had only been a few seconds but the pain made it seem much longer. Lynn was standing over her, bent slightly, and staring at her left side. A small twitch of magic gave her an idea of where the wound was: That massive spear had gone through her side, out her back, partway into the wing.

"Oh, you're still—" She half-turned backwards. "Rayna, what are you seeing?"

"Um—a lot of, like huge injuries all around the head and shoulders. I think just light bruises everywhere else. That crack didn't sound good!"

"Ngh..don't move her," Clera struggled out of her mouth, and then gasped a few times for breath. Her lungs weren't injured, but just breathing enough to speak opened up a new world of pain. "Keep her still!"
"Um—right!" Rayna's voice again.

Dr. Kellen tried to focus. It was an exercise she had always considered promising, but had until now been lucky enough to avoid any chances to test out. She made an effort to diagnose the injuries, focusing as much mental energy on that as she could so there would be as little brainpower left as possible to feel pain. It was all skin and bone and muscle that was injured—no vital organs. She would live. She wouldn't be able to move for a while, and would badly need some...some surgery just to close the wounds, normally, but...here there was magic.

She shifted her focus to an active spell, something to boost her own regeneration. Her side visibly glowed blue, and she let out a yell, a solid "AaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAH!" It hurt far worse than the injury itself had. There were tears of sheer pain coming from her eyes, partially blinding her again.

Lynn jumped back slightly. "Clera?! What—are you—?"

Clera had to stop the magic's work for a second just to breathe. After a few gasps of air, she said, "I should be healing. Does it look like it is healing?"
"It.." The human's eyes darted in the direction of her wound for a second and then back away again. "Y-yeah, it looks, um, smaller."

"What else do I do? I'm holding her but she isn't moving at all!"

"Is she breathing?"
"Um—yes! But not..I think she's unconscious."

Dr. Kellen sighed. "Elevate the head and shoulders slightly! I am probably going to scream again." A blue glow covered her side once more, and she sustained it for as long as possible before releasing again.

The pain eased off slowly, and she sat up, turning her head to look. It looked like the hole had closed at least, though she could tell it wasn't entirely fixed yet. Lynn looked like she'd spent the past several seconds wincing. The fox-girl said, "Hey! What do we do about—how do you fix a head injury?"

"That isn't the kind of thing that one can just fix," said Clera. "At least, not normally." She took another deep breath and focused on healing her own wound, knowing better than to try walking over in this state.

Another yell of pain later, Clera examined the wound again. It was nearly gone; the normal regeneration would probaby cover it. But exerting that much magic had nearly exhausted her, and being out of breath on top of that didn't help. She reached up a hand to Lynn, who took the signal after a second and helped her get up. "Take me—over to her," said the doctor.

"Uh, yeah, okay." The winged girl leaning on her, Lynn took the four or five steps over to where Aria was lying on the cave floor, with Rayna holding her head up slightly.

"W-wait a minute, are you gonna eat her skull fracture?!" said Lynn, slightly panicked, while Clera moved to sit down next to the shapeshifter. "We can't—neither of us have any idea what to do in this situation! How do we get you back to town?"

"I will not take too much to remain conscious," said Clera matter-of-factly. "The goal is to heal her enough that we can return her to town and get her proper help there." She placed her hands gently just on top of Aria's head, and concentrated again, pulling some of that injury out and into herself. It came in like a massive, splitting headache, and she closed her eyes in a hard wince, leaning back away again.

This looked like the kind of head injury that people couldn't walk at all after, much less walk away from. Dr. Kellen dreaded to think what would've happened if Aria hadn't had heightened physical defenses from the sword demon...then again, a blow to the head should be a blow to the head, either way. She focused on healing her own new head injury, trying to make it go more slowly so it wouldn't force her to scream again or worse, ruin her stated plan by knocking her out. It still hurt, but the effort of slowing it down did seem to help a bit.

She opened her eyes again, and found the other two conscious members looking at her in concern, Lynn leaned halfway toward her. "Give me space!" she shouted angrily, making them both jump. "Not you—" she snapped at Rayna right away—"Keep holding her still! Don't jerk around."

"R-right!"

"Go stand over there!" She added to Lynn, pointing vaguely to another part of the small cavern. The archer backed in that general direction, still watching what was going on with a concerned look.

Clera took on some more of Aria's injury. There was a slight snapping sound from both of their heads as the shifter's skull pulled itself a bit more together, while cracks undoubtedly appeared on the target skull. The winged girl felt briefly sick and disoriented, but pushed against it, ordering her magic to heal the new wound just as patiently as the last one. She took a few deep breaths, nearly welcoming the pain this time as it at least fixed the other effects of a major head injury. After her earlier outburst, the others in the cave didn't seem to think they were supposed to talk, which was just as well—less noise, less distraction.

In this way, Aria's head injury was slowly downgraded from a probable skull fracture to something closer to a concussion, by way of Clera feeling briefly the effects of several concussions and significantly more pain from headaches than she'd felt in her entire life prior. But eventually it was done, and it was going to be relatively safe to move Aria back to town if they were careful about it.

"..All right." Dr. Kellen took another deep breath. Her magic was entirely spent, a deeply uncomfortable feeling somehow, but more importantly, she was too exhausted to move the patient. "You two will have to carry her out of here. Carefully." It would be difficult to move herself, but she would just have to manage. Neither of those available seemed strong enough to carry someone Aria's weight on their own, especially not all the way to town.
Lynn came closer again. "Um, how do we, carry a person?" said Rayna, her tone indicating she felt a bit stupid not to know.

Clera sighed. "I'll explain this to you slowly, one step at a time, so you'll understand..."

---

That haze was persistent. Katherine's best efforts just barely managed to extract a few stray thoughts, none of which were particularly enlightening: Random words or images in isolation. If she had to guess based on what she'd seen, Rose was just thinking about the catgirl's looks and voice...but surely she was thinking about more than that. After all, she was participating in conversations related to the tour of town just as much as Katherine was, and of course her own high-intelligence-score ability to concentrate on several things at once evened that out to what she'd have been able to do with full attention on it back on Earth.

Eventually, an interesting question did come up. "Heyy, so..." The dragon-girl looked around the main square, which they had arrived at for the fifth time so far.
"What?"
"I noticed, there's not any um, stone people. Or, things like that, uh...it makes it a hard to get any sense of where we are. I-I mean, your tour's been super helpful, but, everything is houses and shops and..there's only the um, big places toooo..." She let the word hang, unable to think of the term.

"You mean..there's hardly any landmarks. Like, statues and monuments. Right?"
"Uh-huh!" The dragon-girl nodded.

"Well, this is a frontier town. It's hard just to survive here with all the monsters, and it was built pretty recently, so...maybe nobody thinks it's worth the effort to build a monument or a statue around here. Or an art installation or whatever." Katherine was just thinking aloud, but it sounded reasonable enough. "So the only real landmarks are big buildings like the library that serve some other practical purpose..."

"Ooh! I should ask if they want me to grow a biiig tree somewhere," said Rose, gesturing excitedly. "People could always see it from anywhere in town, and meet there even if they get lost!"

"Er, that's not a bad idea...I don't really know who you'd ask for permission, though. It seems like, with the walls and the need for farmland, real estate is kinda tight, so someone's gotta be managing that.."

"Maybe we should ask the nice Captain!" Rose chirped.

"She doesn't seem like the bureaucratic type. Then again..." Katherine paused, remembering that she had more or less given their party some land earlier. "No, yeah, she's probably the right person to ask. No idea what her office hours actually are, though." On second thought, it couldn't be more obvious that she was the one pulling the strings, if not the outright ruler of the place. It reminded the psion of her own intentions of eventually becoming some kind of ruler herself...they'd gotten a bit sidelined in the day-to-day of monster slaying, but building up her reputation and affluence was a good start anyway. Maybe the Captian would have some tips on the work of ruling itself, if the question could be posed just right.

"Well, the guard place is right there, isn't it?" said the dragon-girl while Katherine was busy thinking that.

"Yeah. Wouldn't hurt to check." Rose led the way over toward the guardhouse, bouncing slightly in her walk, and Katherine followed.

"We want to talk to the captain about something," she said to the guy at the desk, a wolf-eared man with long black hair.

"Uh..well, um." He fidgeted nervously a bit. "She sorta just stepped out a few minutes ago. Didn't say where she was goin'."

"Does she do that a lot?"

"I...guess she does? She's always here for..anytime she's meetin' with someone, though. Or regular inspections. And surprise inspections. Hey, are you..?"
"What?" Katherine already knew his entire planned question by now but decided to let it play out rather than skip to the end, for Rose's benefit if nothing else.
"You're a mind-reader, right?" he said, quieter and a bit conspiratorially.

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, when you're meetin' with her...not that ya have to, or anything, but maybe you could ask her how old she is? I was talkin' with someone lately, and...well, nobody really seems ta know. But even if she doesn't answer, then you could sorta...see it, right?"
"Sure I could. Why are you so interested in it anyway? Don't you know better than to ask a lady's age?" she said teasingly.

"Y-yeah, that's why I was hopin' you could find some kinda way to do it where she wouldn't even know you were askin'," he said, rubbing the side of his ear nervously. "It's just, she's human, and she looks as young as you or me, but she's been here since my ma and pa were green."

"That is a little mysterious. I guess I'll keep it in mind," said Katherine. Of course she already had a plan A since Rose was listening intently to the whole conversation. The dragon-girl would inevitably blurt out the question with little to no prompting, possibly even on sight. Plan B would be formed by then in case she somehow did restrain herself for once.

"Well, we'll check back in a little later then," said the catgirl. "Actually, when is regular inspection?"
"Early afternoon," he said. "Sometimes she catches some slackers taking an early lunch break. Ain't fun to be one of them."

"Then we'll show up while she's doing that, and catch her when she's done. Simple enough."

---

Nora did some more reading in the library. It was relaxing, and reminded her of home—real home, not fake new home from her dreams. Back then she wouldn't have dreamed of being able to run and jump around at will, much less fighting dangerous monsters...but as exciting and great as it was to not constantly fear injury from things normal people could do on a whim, peacefully relaxing and reading felt like her more natural state.

The goddess of nature was a centaur, seemingly the only being of that body type in this world. She had a wound on her side which was matched in statues by first making the statue whole, then carefully carving out the scar. Reports on what exactly had caused that wound were conflicting, but seemed generally to suggest she fought against some dark force alongside the other gods at some point close to or during the creation of the world. Most of her worshipers were beastfolk and elves, the former often crediting her with helping them come into being in the first place. Her worship usually included planting and tending gardens in certain specific ways, the descriptions of which Nora found herself skimming by reflex, as if she'd learned the methods a long time ago and knew them by rote. Her religion considered the domestication and farming of animals distasteful, but allowed eating meat "rightly earned" through hunting. Those who chose to hunt were strictly instructed to do so by need and not for sport, and encouraged to use every part of the animal they could, leaving the rest to be returned to nature.

"Hey." Zack showed up after a while, the wolf following behind him this time. It didn't seem like the librarians cared about a little more fur in here after all. His hair was just past the shoulders in the back, with the bangs and sides seemingly grooomed but not shortened. His ears and tail looked a bit..fluffier, maybe.

"Hello..." she said quietly. "Your haircut looks g-good. But, uh...I thought you'd want it shorter than that, even."

"Well, I did, but..." He came closer and sat next to her on the couch. "I told them I wanted it really short so it wouldn't get in my way. I specifically said 'cut it like a boy's hair'. They kept saying what a big shame it was and then they just refused to cut it past here." He gestured to where it was now. "Then they insisted on washing it and then washing and grooming all of my fur before they'd let me leave."

"You c-could try a different place," said the elf.
"Yeah, but..I mean, it was cheap, and it's definitely a lot less in the way already, so I figured it's good enough for now. Maybe I'll just take a sword to it myself like Mulan or something."

"That d-doesn't sound like it should be cheap," she said.

"Yeah, they said they were giving me a discount because my hair was a pleasure to work with or something...I don't really get it. But after that, I did some quick exercises to check, and I actually feel less restricted without the hair in my way. So, Mika was wrong."

"Mira."
"Whatever. Look, did you..have any lingering effects from the...from last night?"

Nora shook her head. "I had a strange d-dream, but it was..I don't th-think it was because of the demon."

"What was strange about it?"
"Um..it felt, f-familiar somehow. I was somewhere I've never b-been, but I felt like I'd been there my whole life."
Zack got a distinct look of recognition. "It felt like a memory?"

"R-right."

"I had something like that a couple of nights ago! It was...I was fighting against some kind of demon woman, but I was...I wasn't me, and I wasn't like this either. I was, what this would look like male," he said, vaguely gesturing to his own female body. "I was with a bunch of knights fighting her, but I was the last survivor. And then, I won, but she...used some kind of magic on me, which turned me into..looking like this again."

"Hm..." Nora thought about it for a moment. "You've b-been telling people you were cursed to have that body."

"Right..." He didn't seem to know where she was going with it.
"My dream last night m-matched with...those bandits who captured me briefly, th-thought I was some kind of runaway priestess. They were hoping to g-get a ransom for that. I wonder if your d-dream is supposed to be an explanation for, how and when you were c-cursed."

Zack's ears folded slightly. "That doesn't make any sense. The curse thing is just what I tell people because nobody would understand what really happened."

"B-but you had a dream, that felt like a memory, r-right? I-in my case, it was something someone else said about me. Maybe it works b-both ways."

"Wait wait, what works both ways?"

"S-somehow or other..the game, or the world, is..t-trying to give us actual backstories," Nora said. "I-I mean, pasts. In this world. P-people who would remember or recognize us, and memories for us in d-dreams. It's as if the world h-has some ideas of its own, b-but if we say something about ourselves then it's t-taking that into consideration too."

"How would that even work? This isn't...I mean, it's a game I guess but it's, how does a world create its own past after the fact?"
"I don't know...b-but it makes a kind of sense, doesn't it? D-do you remember when Katherine said she f-felt uneasy about getting into the water, and d-didn't know why?"
"...Yeah," he said after a moment.

"S-she doesn't have normal dreams. So maybe, there's some k-kind of backstory formed in her subconscious too, b-but she doesn't have access to it to see the m-memories directly because of that."

"So back up a minute. You're saying that because I told people I was cursed to have this body, I might actually be cursed?"
"Err...r-right."

His ears folded to the back of his head. "Ugh, great."

"W-well, it means all you have to do t-to, change back at least as far as being male, is b-break the curse, right?"

"Yes, but if the world wants me to stay like this then it just can. I mean, if there's magic that can change people's sex then, then the curse could make it so that wouldn't work on me like it would on everyone else!"

"That...y-you should probably stop having ideas for it, then," said Nora. "Or, we sh-should say there's something specific but s-slightly hard to find that will b-break it easily?"

"Yes. Let's say that." He nodded. "Figure out what it is later. What were you reading about?"

"Um, w-well I was some kind of p-priestess in my dream, so I was r-reading about the goddess I was supposed to be s-serving in it," she said.